What is Ultimate Truth?

April 6, 2017 Ultimates No Comments

We don’t know whether ‘ultimate truth’ exists. Although we think to know something about our universe – when it started, where it ends – we don’t know whether this universe is only a blink in a much wider space and time… or maybe in something completely different.

And then what about ‘God as creator of the universe’? Has anything been created at all, some time?

[This is an ‘Ultimates’ text. Please, don’t take it at face value.]

Still, religion is about seeking the truth

(and about some other sociocultural issues of course).

Religious people want to believe in the true God (or Gods or something ‘divine’). They don’t want to believe in a phantasm.

But is ‘God’, in an incomprehensible whole, comprehensible? Is it thus even possible to truly believe in something to which we humans may lend the characteristic of ‘truth’?

And science… same thing

As well as religion, science wants to attain, or at least approach truth somehow. Scientifically, we want to build up a body of truth. Science thus has the same end-goal as religion.

The methods differ.

Ideas about what ultimate truth may be about also differ.

But what then in God’s name – or in Science’s name – may be this ultimate truth?

Descartes was sure of only one thing: “I think…”

and saw this as proof of being: “… therefore I am.”

Meanwhile, the “I” and the “think” have been unmasked as two of the most debatable concepts that “I” can “think” of. Problematic, since there is no real alternative to this ‘final truth.’ Our knowledge about anything at all thus looks like an imploded bubble.

Still, there is progress.

And with progress, there is a striving for more.

And that’s OK.

‘Truth’ is still the highest good. We should back away from blatant untruth. Even if ultimate truth is not – ever – to be comprehended by mortals like us, the striving that we feel as a striving-for-truth is there. This striving is part of an ethical stance. It’s an end-value.  It doesn’t even matter therefore whether we even are principally able to reach the final goal.

In religion as in science, let’s just do the best we can.

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